Talking light sculpture at Vivid Festival

For the first time, Vivid Festival, Sydney’s annual music and light festival, will feature a talking light sculpture - Ray. This will be the first installation to be powered by renewable energy.

The sculpture will be brought to light by The Sunflower, Southern Cross University’s solar powered audiovisual system at the festival to be held along the Harbour foreshore from 23 May to 9 June.

Standing seven metres tall and positioned outside the Museum of Contemporary Art, Ray will be made up of strips of multicoloured light connecting to a base. Ray is the brainchild of Pollinate Energy, an Australian social enterprise that installs solar lights in India’s urban slums.

The SCU Sunflower, designed and constructed by students, researchers and creative arts technicians at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, has also provided renewable energy at Byron Bay Bluesfest (where it was officially launched in March last year), the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival, Tekstar Festival (Byron Bay) and the WOMEX Festival in Brisbane. At Vivid, festivalgoers can interact with Ray by pulling on cords located in the charging pods, causing computer-animated light sequences to shoot towards the summit of the sculpture. Ray will gradually get fully charged from the coloured lights pouring in, culminating in a surge of sound, light and colour.

Dr Barry Hill and Dr Matt Hill have composed a soundscape for Ray’s installation that will be programmed to match the movement of the lights around the sculpture through a six-channel spatialised audio soundscape. “This interactive design symbolises the way that the more our community engages with ideas around sustainability, the more energy will be put into developing innovating solutions to global energy and technology needs,” said Dr Barry Hill, who is the university’s contemporary music course coordinator.

In collaboration with Byron Bay-based creative data programmer artist Kim O’Sullivan, the Sunflower has recently been installed with an interactive data network that enables SCU technicians to monitor information from the solar energy generation and production cycle via a mobile phone. Thanks to a Wi-Fi communication network that takes advantage of the Sunflower’s newly installed interactive data capabilities, Vivid festivalgoers can interact with Ray to find out about his day using #HiRay via his social media identities. Ray will report on how he is feeling: loved or lonely, high or low on solar energy, happy or unhappy about air quality and pollution levels. He will also be collecting information at the installation site, including ambient weather data, amount of solar battery charge and number of public interactions.

“The aim is to develop a ‘think green’ ethos within the Australian creative arts industry and to promote best practice in solar and alternative power generation. Vivid strongly reflects the themes of the Sunflower solar audio research project, combining the perfect combination of music, light and a public festival for the Sunflower to get involved in - almost too good to be true,” said Dr Hill.

Alexie Seller, national manager of business development and operations at Pollinate Energy, said their organisation wanted to work with specialist partners to make Ray’s solar component a reality.

“We recognised immediately that we would need to do something innovative - putting panels on a roof somewhere just wasn’t going to cut it. Along with Dr Barry Hill from SCU, we pulled in renewable energy and structural engineers from AECOM to provide expert engineering advice.”

Four students from the university’s contemporary music program will be travelling to Sydney to monitor the Sunflower’s status at the Vivid Festival and to act as ambassadors for the Sunflower project. A whole host of design and creative teams have rallied behind the story of Pollinate Energy to bring Ray to life for the festival. This collaboration includes musicians and researchers Dr Barry Hill and Dr Matt Hill from the university’s School of Arts and Social Sciences; Sydney-based sculpture designers Amigo and Amigo; creative data systems company S1T2; and experience-design duo Wildwon.